Being Average is Not a Bad Thing

This paper will discuss the article “We’re All Above Average” from our text book (Noe, Hollenbeck, Gerhart, & Wright, 2011). The article talks about the stigma placed on being considered average during a performance interview. Although many employees do rate in the middle, most employees think they’re above average. So what happens if an employee receives feedback that implies they are average, how would you expect them to react during a performance interview? It has been my experience that most employees know how they are performing either through their own inner insight or from the manager’s consistent feedback throughout the year. They react with little or no emotion. But what happens if the employee is truly surprised? To eliminate most surprises, employees were asked to provide self-evaluations which included their strengths, weaknesses and personal goals. This gave the interviewing manager insight to what the employee thinks of their own performance. It enables the managers to prepare for a more productive feedback interview.

Therefore, the strategic and developmental purposes of performance management will change depending on the self-evaluation and reaction of the employee to the “average” feedback. It is without doubt that some employees are perfectly happy meeting standards and being rated “average”. Reinforcing this behavior is appropriate if the current behavior is satisfactory and acceptable to the organization. However, if the employee is surprised by the “average” rating and the performance behavior needs to be pushed up a notch, then developmental goals should be introduced. The performance appraisal or feedback interviews are the appropriate tools to accomplish this task.

The performance appraisal can be modified to address the resistance to being considered average and address the